THERE'S NOTHING TO WRITE ABOUT THAT ISN'T PLAGUE

If you're feeling freaked out by self-quarantining, you can at least be a little glad that you aren't alone. At this point, most of the world is locked down to some extent with curfews, bans on public meetings, shutdowns of businesses and other such things. Well, except for the United States, but we'll get to them in a bit.

Right now the idea of the "Covid-19 curve" has really started to sink in for a lot of people as more countries start climbing along that curve. Spain is already seeing the same ICU overload and triage conditions that Italy was seeing two weeks and now has more virus deaths than Iran does (with about half the population and far more resources, so that's honestly much worse). Italy, meanwhile, now has more deaths than China does. (Well, that China admits to having, at least.) France's curve is skyrocketing as they've had their first doctor die from the virus while fighting it.

And of course, deaths are bad, but how about the economy? I kid, but plenty of people - most of whom are, let's be honest, extraordinarily comfortable people - are making this sort of noise right now. And yes, it does turn out that having a global pandemic will hurt the economy because - let me check my notes for a second - ah, yes, because "people don't want to die." Now, sure, I am playing this a little light because we're into two weeks (maybe) of quarantining and it's a little premature to start the philosophical debate about whether sustaining human life is more important than sustaining human ideas (like "wealth," which is only a thing we made up after all). And maybe it's only a little premature right now, because unemployment is skyrocketing everywhere (heck, I'm basically unemployed right now, because the courts are closed and nobody gets divorced during a pandemic, it turns out) and because most of the usual ways societies use to combat unemployment don't work nearly as well in a service-dedicated economy when manufacturing is mostly shut down (there's no construction sector, for example, which is one of the usual places to send money because then the construction sector builds things, which can be useful later on).

Yes, we can just give everybody money for a while, but not forever because inflation is a thing that happens, and the radical socialist idea of "well what if we just forget about money for a while" is great in theory but in practice people will find a way to profiteer (which has happened in every communist society so far, usually in concert with whomever's in charge making sure their friends benefit, and... but I digress). The general prognosis, from economists I read, is that as societies we can basically continue lockdowns for somewhere in between four to eight weeks before things really start to hit the economic wall, and then we need to figure out some radical solutions in one way or another.

What that probably looks like, if we want to have any success, is a mass testing regime akin to what's happening in China and Japan and South Korea. Basically, if you are testing everybody fairly regularly, you can stop Covid-19 from mass-infecting people, because once you find someone who has it you figure out who they've met and where they've been since their last test and you can hopefully stop the spread before it starts with minimal pain to all involved. Mass testing regimes are still expensive, mind you, but they allow societies to hopefully get back to something approaching normal. (All of this is of course still sort of theoretical, because it's not like those countries have proven they're out of the woods yet.)

Besides, we'll probably not wait that long, because at a certain point politicians are going to start doing calculus and decide that the economic value of the people likely to die (who are mostly going to be older people out of the workforce) is much less than the value of the people going back to work, and also that dead people don't vote and a lot of people won't be inclined to directly blame anybody for pandemic deaths of their loved ones.

So now that we've discussed the "hopeful solutions" part of the pandemic news, let's turn to the USA, which is where all the "hopeless mess" results seem to be turning out. To be fair, many individual American states are reacting as comprehensively as possible to the pandemic - Washington, California, New York, Ohio, Kentucky, et cetera. The problems are that others aren't (Florida is a mess, Texas only slightly better) and that the federal government's response has been a joke, and that the President is an idiot who seems determined to make everything worse at every possible step, and that a huge chunk of the American populace (mostly divided along partisan lines) believes this pandemic is not a big deal, and that America's private healthcare system is completely unable to deal with a major pandemic, and that a large number of American politicians think that a suitable economic solution for the current recession facing the economy is a large number of subsidies and tax breaks to large corporations. That is a whole lot of problems!

In all seriousness, though, the total ineptness of American society being unable to handle this sort of problem was not inevitable, because it is quite clear that in most states where Democrats are in charge, they are mostly dealing with the pandemic in a responsible and sane way, insomuch as they are able to given the limited powers of the states to do so. Republican states have been much more of a mixed bag, with Republican governors largely taking minimal and/or too-late steps to address the crisis. This is mostly because Republicans face political pressure - both from the party and their base - to stay in line with what Donald Trump is saying, and Trump has demonstrated an outright pathological need to downplay the impact of the pandemic as much as possible for months now and just straight-up lie about what the government is or more often is not doing. It is honestly sort of difficult to overstate how much damage Donald Trump is doing to America right now, because the ICU overload that places like Spain and Italy are dealing with is already starting to happen in the United States where the disease hit first (Washington) and hardest (New York), and over the next week you're going to start seeing serious pain start to spread across the country, and we can only hope that mass panic doesn't follow along with that.

As for Canada - I genuinely don't know. I think as a nation we've mostly taken self-quarantining pretty seriously across the board, which is good (it probably helped a lot that we had to do it in March, AKA "the worst month"), but our economy wasn't that strong before the pandemic and global recession, which is very likely for the next year and a half, will hit us really hard, so I don't know how long the public appetite for "let's all chip in by staying home" will last, especially when there are a lot of Tory leaders who would dearly love to make Justin Trudeau look bad. I don't think we're going to get it as bad as a lot of places will, but I think it's still going to be pretty rough.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

The Brothers Bloom (2008, Rian Johnson, Blu-ray) - 3.5/5

The Godfather Part II (1974, Francis Ford Coppola, Amazon Prime) - 5/5

Foolproof (2003, William Phillips, Amazon Prime) - 3/5

Night Shift (1982, Ron Howard, DVD) - 3/5

Other than that, a lot of XCOM, and I'm baking a fair amount. I've pretty much got challah nailed down at this point, but macaron are proving a much harder challenge for now.

See you in seven.